Back to the Future…

When I got back, after a really long while, to my blog, I found myself in the future. With all the attendant disorientation that it entails.Basically, my blog has moved on without me. When I asked the ‘evil’ question, I scarcely imagined it would set off an Armageddon in blogosphere! An intense metaphysical debate was/is on in my last post, while I had drawn into my seldom-seen shy, Crustacean self.I hate to be quoting myself, but I must repeat this, Life Goes On in the Blog… With, or without you.

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I was away in Hyderabad for three days last week. I’m back now, with merely one interesting tale to narrate:An information officer with the Andhra Pradesh government was recounting the problems he faces on the job. Once, on a condom promotion campaign, he found himself face-to-face with a tribal in interior AP. This guy had no clue as to what the freebie he had just been given was all about. The officer did not speak the man’s native tongue, but tried his best to tell the villager about how to use a condom. Believing himself to have suceeded moderately, he decided it was time to move on. As he was walking away, he turned back to see the perplexed villager put the condom in his mouth and begin chewing it. “Apparently, he thought it was medicine of some sort and did the only thing he thought should be done with medicine,” our information guy said ruefully.

There is never a dull moment in the great Indian sub-continent, is there?!

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I’ve also called this post Back to the Future, because when I started writing it (which was a few days ago), I had just seen Michael J.Fox on TV, campaigning for awareness about Parkinson’s Disease. Did we know he was diagnosed with P.D. when he was just 30? Is it going to be scary taking a time-machine to HIS future? I sure hope not, Marty McFly.

A day before, I had seen poetry in motion, in Black. Sheer poetry. I’m way past the review stage, so I’ll be content saying this: Once in a long while in the history of loud cinema, there comes a pearl of sublimity, quiet class, sensitivity and yes, poetry.Black is one such dewdrop.